


Jamais Vu

by CypressSunn



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: Espionage, Grief/Mourning, Interrogation, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:22:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28139121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CypressSunn/pseuds/CypressSunn
Summary: He never finishes his sentence because the next moment there is a gun shoved in his mouth. One of the strange masked phantoms surrounding him lowers a hand and issues a garbled command, “ɯıɥ ǝʇɐuıɯıןǝ ؛sɹǝpɹo ɹno ǝʌɐɥ ǝʍ” and the trigger is pulled.All he leaves behind is a deep red smear against the wall.
Relationships: Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 63
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Jamais Vu

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Annie D (scaramouche)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scaramouche/gifts).



“Isn’t this when—” he asks, slurred, head cocked to the side but staring directly at Neil. Through the throng of panicked bodies, the whirring red flashing sirens, the gunmen in masks, the students haunched down and faculty shivering in their lab coats on the library floor with their hands on their heads. Through it all, he looks at Neil with dark steady eyes, unmistakable.

He never finishes his sentence because the next moment there is a gun shoved in his mouth. One of the strange masked phantoms surrounding him lowers a hand and issues a garbled command, “ɯıɥ ǝʇɐuıɯıןǝ ؛sɹǝpɹo ɹno ǝʌɐɥ ǝʍ” and the trigger is pulled.

All he leaves behind is a deep red smear against the wall.

*

It didn’t start out so gruesomely. In fact it started when his advisor’s advisor pulled him out of the annual department dinner, dropping a file in his lap and telling Neil he was on facility tour duty for the rest of the foreseeable evening. It is the sort of grunt work an academic peon such as himself had come to expect. He only has one measly masters and in a ballroom full of well published doctorates and insufferable geniuses he’s not someone anyone will miss.

Neil shuffles out quietly, resisting the urge to shrug off the grandfatherly hand on his shoulder attached to the man calling him by the wrong name. When the doors are barred behind him, he’s left in the empty corridor waiting for whoever it is he’s supposed to be waiting for. Some donor with deep pockets and blood bluer than a Tory voting block, he’s sure. Neil is already bored and wishing he had taken one more bite of that Welsh lamb.

“You’re Peter, right?” asks a new voice. That American accent is the last thing he expects. “Here to guide my little walkabout?”

“Er— not exactly. You’ll have to forgive our management. They’re far too preoccupied with theory to remember the names of us mere teaching assistants.” He holds out his hand. “My actual name is—”

“Neil.” His hand is warm. His grip is firm when he gives one solid, attentive shake. “It’s good to meet you.”

“And… and you too.” Neil laughs because there isn’t much else to do. If he were being honest, the other man’s instant sense of congeniality makes him hold on for a moment too long. It has been some time since he saw a new face, or at least one that saw him back. He clearly needs to spend less time on campus, lost in the flurry of the library or floating in a sea of faces in lecture hall, if this is really all it takes to get his heart racing.

That, and he is handsome. Older, well north of forty, greying around the temples, striking features and excellent taste in formal wear. Neil wonders for a moment why he isn’t sitting in on the department dinner, but is instead here traipsing around in the evening light with a nobody such as himself. But whatever his reason, Neil is glad for it. Those men wear their Saville Row suits like costumes to bolster their own sense of importance. But this man wears it like a second skin and still so completely unbeholden to it. Neil isn’t sure how he knows it so well, or so instantly, but this other man is in on it. The confidence game of high society, of academia. He knows.

Of course, Neil can never say as much. So he does his job, launching into his spiel about the history of the campus and the future of its works. It’s a rehearsed and well practiced script. They are turning a corner when he realizes he never got the other man’s name and according to the manners instilled by his mother, it is too late to say anything now.

They will simply have to go on as strangers.

Through the lecture halls, the labs, and reading rooms, they eventually descend into the belly of the south building. It lacks the polish and photo-ready design of the first half of the tour. These chalk white walkways and steel doors were not designed to make prospective students turn out their family savings. These basement workspaces were modeled for function and function only. It’s Neil’s favorite hideaway since he first enrolled, even if it looked like the site of a potential murder in a b-list horror film.

“This is where we store our own personal servers. If you listen closely you can hear the machinery humming through the walls. Through those doors we have all our own generators and backups. It ensures total security, accountability, and up-to-date tracking of our research. The number of patents and published works susceptible to ligiation are greatly decreased according to—”

“There’s no point in this much cyber security if it’s only protected with brick and mortar.”

“I— I’m sorry?” Neil can’t hide how thrown he is. He gets used to the tread of his talking points. Used to the lack of interruption. Used to the absence of real engagement. But he’s serious when he turns to Neil.

“Wired alarms can be cut. An electronic lock can be kicked in. Nothing about this is secure.”

“Were you planning a break-in?” Neil asks, his mouth upturned.

The man smiles back and it’s unfortunate how his pulse jumps at the sight.

“Security theatre has a way of coming back to bite you.”

“I can’t say I disagree,” Neils admits, “but, and I am not supposed to say this, necessarily… but there is not much here worth the effort of stealing. In order to pass off our university’s work as your own, well that alone would require reputable standing in similarly conducted research—”

“That’s operating under the presumption that the most valuable things concealed here are stored in ones and zeroes.”

Neil chuckles lightly, politely. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“You should rethink that policy,” says the older man over his shoulder. He’s already striding up to a locked door, prying open a metal box with some tool Neil can’t see.

“I’m sorry, but what policy?”

“Not following.” The exposed wiring shorts out under his quick, mindful, line creased hands. “I can guarantee you, where I’m headed is way more interesting than anything back up those stairs.”

Neil glances aside. The handrail leads up into the light, towards the long immaculate corridors, into the stuffy rooms filled with snobbery and backhanded competition. Then he turns aboutface, back to the broken open door revealing a lift he’s never seen before. He knows it’s impossibly foolish, impulsive to a degree that might indicate a real break with sanity, but he goes. He goes willingly and without question.

The lift is too small for them to stand without their shoulders touching. Neil knows that any last shred of decorum he possesses should tell him to move away as best he can. But it also should be telling him to get back through the doors before they close. Back up the stairs and into the safety of the known.

But he doesn’t. A bell chimes and the doors slide shut with him and the wrong side of caution, and the descent truly begins.

*

A week later the hostage crisis rocks the library in half. Doors are blown off hinges and barricaded back up with debris. There is a mad rush of pure human chaos, of failures to recognize raw human violence and its indifference to the softer echelons of class and status. Neil watches a quantum physicist lose at least a liter of blood before the students and professionals and reporters and laypersons stop begging and learn to cower quietly.

But none had been more cowardly then Neil. Because when they dragged him out, one of his knees twisted the wrong way, his arm drooping at a painful angle, they searched him. Held up a machine that turned their garbled language into English, demanding he hand over something.

A device. A machine. One Neil is beginning to suspect looks a lot like the incomprehensible clump of metal in the briefcase left in his cubicle.

It’s nearly a month before they left anyone back into the buildings. Neil doesn’t expect it to still be there. But it is. Untouched and feeling radioactive under his palm.

Neil feels he should panic. It worries him that he doesn’t.

*

He’d been alluring, before all the blood. Irresistibly so, in a way that had Neil thinking it would be his downfall. The magnetism he possessed, the way he stepped outside and away from the hindrances of mundanity and legality. Something in the whole of him that kept Neil making mistake after mistake. One colossally stupid choice after another. Betraying his institution, his career, or even his country. And for what?

“You’re rethinking this.” The pair of them are backtracking through the archives. It’s both abysmally late and dreadfully early. They’ve made little progress with paper and digital. 

“Following around a stranger, an American at that, on a goose chase? Yes, if I had any sense I’d reconsider.”

He raked his nails through his salt and pepper beard. “I’m not a stranger. I’m David. You’re Neil. We’re going to save lives.”

Neil shouldn’t be so easily strung along by the way their names sound together. But he is. With a sigh, he hoists himself up, sitting on the hardwood desk David is pouring over. “It’s almost as if you are allergic to offering up any real information. Such as how my university could be at all complicit in life threatening conspiracies.”

David spins ever so in his swivel chair, nudging Neil’s knees. “The reality of what is going on here, once you know it, you can’t unknow it.”

Neil leans closer. “That is generally how knowledge works.”

“But some truths, some realities, it unmakes knowledge. Everything you think, everything you believe and know to be true will be gone, just like—” he snaps his fingers and Neil’s heart is racing. His hair stands on end. His synapses lit up like fireworks. “Not everyone is ready for that.”

“And this knowledge, this power. Who has it now?”

“The wealthy, the privileged. People like your bosses and their bosses. So maybe you should stop asking yourself why you trust me so much, and let yourself follow that instinct. Because I think what you should be scared of, what you should be asking yourself is this; Do you trust men like your superiors and their benefactors with world ending knowledge?”

Neil shakes his head. “Tell me. Tell me all of it.”

David grins, despite knowing Neil would answer as he had before the question was even spoken. “There’s a lot to tell… How about we start with what you know about the second law of thermodynamics?”

Neil chuckles. “Frankly, I’d wager I know a hell of a lot more about it than you.”

*

The world looks the same but it is something else. New and foreign and malevolent. All the places he has been before, all the things he wanted, they feel novel and distant and unrecognizable. His eyes are open and it is all David's doing.

It dawns on Neil too late; David probably wasn’t his real name.

But it does not stop this strange grief.

*

“Forgive me, but if it isn’t too forward to say,” Neil says lowly, the two of them obscured from sight by the stacks of the archives, “but the silver fox thing is working for me.”

David runs his nails through his white tipped stubble. “That so?”

“Exceptionally so. If you were to offer to take me down the corridor, into the storage lift, well, it’d be hard for me to say no.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” the older man says, watching their target has infiltrate the building. 

*

Of course, the one time they’re caught working over an archive, David’s master cover plan is to paw at each other like tawdry closeted lovers. The security guard backs away from the door and dismisses them immediately when he sees David has him pressed to the wall, a hand down his pants. Neil almost hears the uniformed man, but the last cogent thought was that this was what he was chasing, the answer to a question he had barely been able to admit was plaguing him. Because he is a man who sees the order of the world, the disorder scattering the universe, the math on the wall that never breaks even. He sees it but it doesn’t give him clarity. Not the way that following this man off a cliff most assuredly does.

*

At no point does Neil consider turning in the artifact to the authorities or his employers or even abandoning it somewhere. With the right sort of precautions there is little that could ever trace it back to him. Really, what strikes him as the most odd is the fact that he doesn’t think about a way out at all. Even with David gone, he’s in this. There is something salvageable here, something that must be saved.

He’s just patently sure that the thing is not him.

*

“This is the part of the movie where I die, isn’t it?” Neil asks while they are tucked away in a hotel that David springs for. There’s various recording devices, a waste bin full of ashes from what must have once been redacted paperwork and what can only be called other covert operative paraphernalia on the tables and counters. But they aren’t at the kitchenette sink or the coffee table in front of the perpetually running new station. They’re in bed, still slick with sweat and a thrumming post coital high.

Neil doesn’t smoke, but the urge to step into the night air and breathe around this sensation pulling at his chest makes him wish he made less safe choices sooner in life.

David cracks an eye open as his hand skims up the inside of Neil’s thigh.

“I know too much,” Neil continues, “I’ve seen too much.”

“You haven’t seen anything, yet.”

“But Reverse Chronology, the counter positioning of entropy through space and time, that alone must take a few years off my life…” He feels a telltale twitch against his hip. “Oh, I didn’t realize not-so-theorthetical physics is what gets you going in bed.”

A rumble of laughter moves through David, an unbarged depth of water released at last. His lean, scarred torso ripples with the movement, languid and mesmerizing. Neil thinks he can tell which wounds are from bullets and which are from stabbings. He’s certain that with further investigation that ascertaining the root cause of each webbed-white patch of scar tissue will become second nature. He’s always been a quick study. Quick enough to piece together how David likes to be touched. To see through his dogmatic sidestepping of straight answers and feel something they both know is true.

He’s placing fleeting kisses to the underside of David’s cock, when he angles his head up to catch those eyes. “When you or your fellow CIA operatives finally do take me out, just remember this—” David gasps, going spine straight and aching while he grips Neil’s hair. Neil is already wrecked on it, how indelicate David can be when it is just the two of them shielded by nothing but four walls and an absent but ever present timer counting down to a finality.

David, for all his age and wisdom, is nothing but virile. He maneuvers Neil where he wants, and where he wants him is on top. He fits perfectly in the spread of David’s legs, and when their cocks line up Neil bucks his hips and winces at the sweet tight grip on his hip bones. It’s heady and heavy and the most delicious balancing act to keep them aligned while he accelerates his movements. Friction. Pressure. Fathomless greed. It’s all he needs to tip over the edge and drag David down with him.

*

Eventually, they come for him. One some level he knew it would happen. But that’s not to say he didn’t try to prepare himself. The gun he acquired doesn’t help him much. Once the noise starts, it’s hidden in a draw he does not have time to reach. But the knife he learned to conceal in his left shoe is overlooked when they throw the bag over his head and haul him away into some sort of rumbling vehicle. A lorry, most likely.

Neil fails to gather any other information because when he’s shoved inside, his head smashes the side of the metal frame and the world runs like liquid through his fingertips.

When the world is solid again, there is no bag obstructing his view. He can clearly see he is somewhere there is nothing clear to be seen. A nondescript warehouse. Cement pillars, steel scaffolding. Folding chairs and scratchy, thick twin ropes. A distant dripping sound. Rolling motors in the distance.

A mouth splitting punch lands. A direct opening volley to their negotiations. 

“Where is it?” demands an irate voice. He’s speaking forwards. His entropy is in sync with the growing disorder following the arrow of time. Neil pities him, for he has yet to learn this will not work.

Onward or in reverse, Neil has tasted enough of philosophies to know where he stands. Not with academia or the blue bloods, not with Queen and Country or his old faded dreams. He stands with David. 

His captors would realize this soon enough, and they would kill him. But first he knows it’s going to hurt.

*

Though he’s never been one for the metaphysical, Neil lets himself imagine what it would be like to see David again. To feel him close and fill up with all those wild impossibilities. His freedom had been far too short lived. And David owed him. Owed him everything for cracking open the door and letting in the exhilaration and leaving him to live and die in a world stripped of it.

When he blacks out between bouts of pain and threats, he almost hears David’s implacable anecdotes. “What’s happened, happened. Done is done. It takes a while to learn the truth of it all… that order and control are not the same. They can’t be. And anyone who confuses the two…”

*

Neil is thoroughly concussed and definitely has a dislocated shoulder when the last violent gunman threatens to blow his head off. Neil has said nothing for hours and other than spitting blood, no truths have left his lips. He would die with knowledge of where he left the device.

“We cut you in,” offers one with a grizzly scar over his neck and jaw. The olive branch takes the others by surprise, but they quickly nod. “We do not need to get any bloodier.”

“No deal,” Neil spits.

“What are you again? A grad student? Not even twenty-five years old?” Neil closes his eyes, tries to ignore him. But he’s yanked by the chain and forced to listen. “Is this how you want your life to end? Why, when you can be rich? When you can know all the secrets of tomorrow, how to steal life from yesterday?”

Neil coughs when he means to laugh. Damn, his ribs hurt. “Oh poetic. Let me guess, a liberal art degree? Weren’t you just mocking me for my masters?”

The gunmen shoves Neil so hard his chair topples over. The pain it sends shooting up his shoulder is unbearable. He twists and arches and writhes from strained tendons so hard he fears he might break his neck.

The men stand above him pitilessly. “Last chance. Take our offer.”

“Fuck… you…”

“You could have anything you wanted—”

“I said… fuck off!”

“What if we bring him back?” And time stops for Neil and even the eviscerating pain seems to abate. “Oh, you like the sound of that? We could always go back. Undo it all. Unpull that trigger.”

Neil breathes hard. Pushes the air up and through him, from his nose to his throat to his lungs. David’s enigmatic smile washes over him. Like all things tha dare to reach him through the ether, its reverberations last even still. He is not the same man he was before those eyes found his. He can never be again.

This is living, he thinks. Bitter, painful, pointless, and still trying to make meaning out of the worst of it. It happens. It happened. It will never unhappen.

Neil cranes his neck to stare up at his captors one last time.“Don’t worry about the triggers you’ve already pulled. Worry about the one you need to pull now. C’mon now. Get it right over and done with.”

And the silver glinting barrel is level with Neil’s eyes. 

Good.

Fine.

Finished.

And the timer goes off.

*

Once Neil is free of the restraints and David, somehow younger, darker, leaner, steps into view, he punches him with his good arm before losing balance.

But that comes later.

*

“You’re younger. How?”

“You know how,” David replies. He’s whole, hale, perfectly intact. And his damned voice is even the same. Why Neil expects it to be different is a mystery. But so many impossible things weigh down on him, exhausting and intoxicating.

“I know it in theory,” Neil replies, stomach churning with relaxation. “But I saw you die. I saw it. I saw him, the lights going out.”

“The track had to stop somewhere,” David says, with a shrug. Like Neil hasn’t just revealed his fragile morality to him. “We work around it when we can, and accept it when we can’t.”

“You’re insane.”

“You can’t only just be realizing that.”

Neil is of course still pinned down in a black site location, if that’s even what these frightening operatives would call such a stage. So it shouldn’t shock him that David’s freedom, his power, it stretches into terrifying and dangerous ends.

“You’re not CIA,” Neil accuses. “All their accents. You’re the only American—” 

“Never said I was with the company.”

“You implied.”

“Did I?”

Neil is chafing against his restraints. “You allowed me to insinuate.”

“How presumptuous of you.”

David’s already dismissed his peons, so when he grabs a chair and spins it backwards to sit with Neil they’re face to face, fully alone.

“Am I betraying my country right now?” Neil asks.

“Depends. Which country are we in again?”

“I cannot tell if you are serious or not.” He barely straints a chuckle. The wounds he sustained feel worth it. Because isn’t this what he wanted? to see him again. “Was… was anything you said the truth? Was any of it real?”

“If I’m half the covert operative you think I am, what good is asking that?”

“What about your name?”

“A name is a name.”

“Then why all this? If not to tie me off like a loose end? Or better yet, why not just ask where I hid the device? I would have told you.”

“Trial by fire is a tenet we ascribe to. It’s the final step in your recruitment.”

Neil grits his teeth. Neither he nor David remark on the layer of wet gathering in his eyes. “Do you scout all your recruits by giving them a front row seat to your gruesome death?”

David looks away for the briefest moment, before turning back. Those eyes. Still the same. “What’s done is done. The me that you knew, he’s gone.”

“You think it’s that easy to let go? You think it was that easy to say no to saving him?”

“No.” David kisses him before he removes the cuffs. “I understand exactly how hard it is to stop yourself. I know how deep it hurts to have to let go.”

*

Then he punches David, in his perfect, handsome face. In the cheekbone, hard enough to break a few knuckles in his hand.

David just laughs it off. “At least you didn’t try to stab me with the knife in your boot.”

*

After, time is meaningless. After, time is everything. Time with the one thing that makes the minutia into something significant. Time with the one who takes the ennui of an aimless soul sets it loose like an arrow. Not to be controlled or reclaimed, but purposeful and trusted in where it might land. They never stop stealing moments. In between the averted crisis and the disasters that never strike, they build together and bide their time. The rest of his life. The rest of David’s. The quiet calm in the early morning, where David stretches out across the pillow and Neil hides his blissful face against his chest. Where their hands touch and their fingers fold, the unchangeable future and the immutable past weaving into the present of their choose. David yawns, whispering something; a half finished thought, an echo that had not yet begun.

“—we met in the middle?” 

**_début._ **


End file.
